Service provider’s growth journey boosted by smart automation

Company

Inventx is a Swiss IT partner for leading financial and insurance service providers and offers services and solutions in digital banking, FinTech, IT management and application management outsourcing. Founded in 2010, the Swiss company is on a growth path with its digital solution for financial and insurance institutions. Inventx now employs over 300 people.

Starting point

Gap between project teams and IT operations

Many teams, many versions, many scripts – Inventx AG had a complex, very PowerShell-heavy cloud infrastructure. While the project teams were rather small and very PowerShell-savvy, many more people had to deal with the provided scripts after the end of each project. In day-to-day business, IT operations had to execute those scripts to manage the systems. The project teams’ desire was to delegate more tasks and to empower colleagues to act independently. They needed to find a solution that would significantly simplify operations, reduce complexity, increase satisfaction of all parties involved, and that would support Inventx on their growth journey.

Challenge

Lack of overview

As is common in IT enterprise environments, several automation platforms were in place, alongside which ScriptRunner was to be implemented as a platform for Windows operation. In addition, scheduled and automated tasks – created with the WindowsTask Scheduler – existed on various server systems. However, an option to monitor executed tasks was missing.

Manual operations

Furthermore, about 60 PowerShell scripts were executed manually by the administrators of various teams via Microsoft‘s Integrated Scripting Engine (ISE). The goal was to enable help desk employees as well as administrators in IT operations to take over administrative tasks themselves without having to rely on the help of the project teams. This is where ScriptRunner comes in handy with its delegation capabilities and secure credential management.

Solution

Live monitor and reports facilitate troubleshooting

The proof of concept (PoC) was done with structured and generic PowerShell scripts. During the testing phase, Inventx evaluated several use cases. First, scripts scheduled via the Windows Task Scheduler were transferred. They run fully automated and can be monitored in the ScriptRunner Portal. It is immediately evident when actions run into an error. Details for troubleshooting can be found in the holistic, comprehensible reports. ScriptRunner also convinced with the automatic display of parameters in the Graphical User Interface (GUI). From the PowerShell scripts, the software automatically generates a user interface.

REST API paves the way towards end-to-end automation

There is no automation without integration – an important use case right from the start was therefore the connection of ScriptRunner via REST API to third-party systems and to the API of Inventx‘s own portal ix.Cloud. Various services are provided to end customers via ix.Cloud. The integration was a great success, therefore more and more fully automated processes are now being triggered in ix.Cloud, while ScriptRunner makes sure all scripts run smoothly. The experienced system engineers quickly realized how easily they could transfer their existing scripts. Without any complicated configuration, employees could write, insert, and use their scripts as usual and make them available to other employees as so-called ScriptRunner actions in the Portal, regardless of their PowerShell knowledge. Once these actions are created, tasks can be easily delegated to help desk and even end users. The advantages were immediately obvious and thus ScriptRunner quickly became accepted.

Upgraded workflows increase satisfaction

ScriptRunner is currently used to manage systems such as Microsoft 365, Active Directory (AD), Citrix or Hyper-V. Whereas in the past, help desk employees could only record and pass on problems, they now have a solution to independently solve issues and perform operations such as changing passwords, creating and unlocking users in AD, or provisioning virtual machines under VMware or Hyper-V. A win-win situation: A significant upgrade of the help desk activities and a noticeable relief for the system engineers.

The Inventx IT operations team sums up: “We are significantly faster and more efficient. We can visualize end-to-end operational activities via ScriptRunner, closing the gap between IT project teams and IT operations.“

Result

In the beginning, Inventx focused on a smooth handover from the project teams to IT operations. Due to their strong growth and the increased number of customers, the reduction of complexity and the delegation of tasks from systems engineering had become necessary. Help desk users can now solve almost all simple tickets independently via ScriptRunner, their work has been upgraded and overall performance and compliance with SLAs has been improved. ScriptRunner became Inventx’s central automation platform. Script storage is centralized and traceable, scripts are now created in a structured and rather generic way, allowing Inventx to deploy one script to multiple customers. The script development process follows modern standards and includes versioning via GitLab with connection to ScriptRunner using repository sync. Versioning was thus achieved automatically. All processes are documented in a comprehensible manner.

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